Development for LHC@home

From the last Boinc Workshop, David Anderson presentation:

Future
● Run apps in Docker natively (no VBox)
○ Detect Docker in client, use a wrapper
○ Move boinc2docker into BOINC
○ Windows: conflict with VBox :-(

Seems that, with version 9 of the client (beta will be, probably, avaiable at December) we will have a first version of Docker support.

Are LHC admins working on it?

Meantime, the boinc admins released a new version of boinc vbox wrapper: release notes

A comment from Boinc developers..

We want to deprecate VBox functionality in future.

In reply to boboviz's message of 10 Apr 2025:

A comment from Boinc developers..

We want to deprecate VBox functionality in future.

I guess you refer to this comment:
https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/issues/6134#issuecomment-2740452125

If so you may have also noticed this:

Wait for a couple of releases for feedback, and remove this functionality completely together with VBox support (will take a couple of years for that until all the projects that use VBox now switch to WSL/Docker).

At least for now (in relation to LHC@home)
- docker apps are under heavy development and not even released on prod
- snapshots are not yet implemented/tested
- there is no long term experience; maybe there are currently unknown pitfalls

In reply to computezrmle's message of 10 Apr 2025:

If so you may have also noticed this:
[quote]Wait for a couple of releases for feedback, and remove this functionality completely together with VBox support (will take a couple of years for that until all the projects that use VBox now switch to WSL/Docker).

I noticed, i noticed. Indeed they do not say "near future", but it's an big switch and it's important to do things well..

At least for now (in relation to LHC@home)
- docker apps are under heavy development and not even released on prod
- snapshots are not yet implemented/tested
- there is no long term experience; maybe there are currently unknown pitfalls

The second point is important (IMHO)